NAACP

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important African-American activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP, supported Pan-Africanism, and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts 150 years ago this month and Great Barrington's Du Bois anniversary celebration began on January 15 and will continue throughout 2018.

Here to tell us more are Dennis Powell, President of the Berkshire County Branch NAACP;and member of the Steering Committee Du Bois Lecture Series; Professor Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst; Ted Thomas, poet and teacher who directs the student Du Bois spoken word programs; and Barbara Dean, musician, performer, and radio DJ who has worked on Du Bois issues and promotion in Great Barrington for about three decades.

In the documentary film, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Nancy Buirski reconstructs events from 1944, when Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, was abducted on her way home from church by six white men who then raped her. Though Taylor identified her attackers, a local grand jury did not indict anyone for the crime. The NAACP mobilized a national campaign on Taylor’s behalf, sending Rosa Parks, its leading rape investigator to Abbeville. She and others recognized that, if justice could be served, it would be the result of reporting outside the immediate area. They nationalized the case yet the perpetrators remained uncharged, and the case slipped into oblivion.

The film will screen in Woodstock on Saturday at 10 a.m. as part of the Woodstock Film Festival and Nancy Buirski will be there for a Q&A following.

NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks will deliver the 21st annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture tonight at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Brooks says he wants to encourage millennials to transform their activism into scholarship, like Du Bois did 150 years ago.

The Forward Together Moral Movement, better known as “Moral Monday,” is a multi-racial, multi-generational movement to battle immoral, extreme policies adopted by the governor and state legislature.

The North Carolina NAACP and the Forward Together Moral Movement are now engaged in litigation to reverse the worst voter suppression laws in the country. Barber is the author of the book The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement.

He will be speaking as part of The Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King Lecture Series on Nonviolent Social Change at Siena College Wednesday 3/30 at 7PM. His talk is titled: “Moral Dissenters are a Necessity for the Destiny, Choosing the Path to Higher Ground.”

Thurgood Marshall the first African American to be nominated to the Supreme Court, brought down the separate but equal doctrine, integrated schools, worked with the NAACP's legal defense fund, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity, but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In a new biography, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall And The Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, award winning author, Will Haygood, details the life and career of one of the most transformative legal minds of the past one hundred years.

NEWBURGH – Unity was the message at a vigil and march for Trayvon Martin in Newburgh Monday night. Fifty people, residents and members of Community Voices Heard and the NAACP, gathered to protest George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the murder of the Florida teenager.

“From this day forward,” community activist Beatrice Harris said, “we have to stand together as ‘the people’.”